Beauty Pageant USA and Its Leadership Scandals

Beauty pageants have been around since photographic beauty contests in the 1850’s and bathing beauty contests in the 1860’s. Despite their long history, they have struggled in recent decades to maintain relevance as cultural norms shift. The most recognizable pageant, the Miss America competition, has had to find a way to boost declining TV ratings and deal with leadership scandals.

Miss USA and its spinoffs have had to figure out how to compete with the rise of social media, and how to downplay the role of physical beauty in a contest that has been historically dominated by it. They have introduced talent and interview competitions, and tried to downplay the swimsuit round of the contest. But they have not been able to shake their reputation as a showcase for a narrow vision of beauty that prizes a demure, slender but not too thin woman with a bright white smile and a coquettish air that is flirtatious but never trashy or sultry.

But while it is easy to dismiss these criticisms as the whims of an overly sensitive and woke culture, they reflect a deeper, consistent critique that goes back to the crinoline age. If a woman is seen as an object to be judged and ogled, smiling but (except for a brief interview) largely silent, shouldn’t it come as no surprise that those who run the pageants may not treat women and girls as autonomous human beings worthy of respect and freedom?